Don Harvey’s paintings explore the
tensions between opposites: sculpture and painting, rural and urban,
human and animal, the untouched environment and man’s intervention, the
divisions between nations. Harvey grew up in rural Iowa and makes his
home these days in urban Cleveland; his father was a successful
inventor with a machine shop—facts which may or may not offer some
light on the artis’s frequent tendency, in his early work, to juxtapose
the agricultural and industrialized worlds. Employing elements of
collage, Harvey has used things like real industrial fluids to
represent lake water and manipulated digital photographs on metal to
represent the industrial and natural environment.

He has produced public art for urban spaces (an example is The Habitat We Share,
created in 1993 for the West 25th Street Rapid Station) and politically
charged art that demands attention (the 2008 series of prints titled Cities and Walls).
It should come as no surprise then that Harvey is a political activist
as well as an artist and teacher. He has been active, both as an
environmentalist and as a photographer, in educating the public about
Cleveland’s natural resources and the threats to them posed by
unthinking human activity: In 2006 he documented wildlife in the city’s
industrial valley for a Cleveland Public Art (CPA) project called "The
Natural Flats: A Field Guide to Habitat in Unexpected Places."

As co-founder of CPA, former editor of Dialogue
and former board member of Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art
(MOCA), Harvey has also had an impact on Cleveland’s artistic
community.

Don Harvey was
born in 1941 in Gruver, Iowa, where he was encouraged in his artistic
inclinations by his parents. In high school he painted scenes of the
changing seasons on the side of his father’s store; but it was not
until college that he decided on a career in art instead of
mathematics. Harvey received a BA from Mankato State University in
Minnesota in 1964 and an MFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of
Art in 1971. He taught in Rochester, Minnesota, before beginning his
college teaching career at the University of Akron in 1973. Since
retiring from the university he has continued to teach, currently as a
visiting professor at Oberlin College.

Since
1983 he has lived in Cleveland, first in the Warehouse District, then
in the Flats, on the city’s west side and now in Cleveland Heights. He
says the greatest influence on his art has been the immediate outside
world around him and that he has received inspiration from looking out
his window at the industrial landscape of Cleveland and while rowing
his boat on Lake Erie just to watch nature and its survival amid man’s
incursion.

The artist who has
most influenced Don Harvey is Robert Rauschenberg, whose work shows a
similar instinct for constructions and collage and an all-inclusive and
expansive artistic vocabulary. Like Rauschenberg, Harvey was to push
the boundaries of what painting and sculpture could be, incorporating
text, photographs and sculpture in his early work. He used whatever
materials were at hand—industrial and windshield washer fluids, vinyl
tubing and steel—to create disturbing images of the urban landscape. He
experimented with an industrial three-color jet-spray process and
sign-painting technology. To portray the dichotomies in his subjects,
he often bifurcated his pieces, which resulted in the “push-pull”
aesthetic associated with Hans Hofmann that he so admired.

Later,
Harvey incorporated human figures into his work, and gradually color
became more dominant. In 2008, as artist-in-residence at Zygote Press,
he experimented with printmaking and photography, applying ink with a
squeegee and attaching three-dimensional objects to his monoprints.

With
the incorporation of more color, Don Harvey’s works have grown more
aesthetically beautiful, and his digitally manipulated images (by
combining the figural with the abstract) more evocative. He continues
to believe, however, that art must tell the viewer where the artist
stands on a matter: “An art object always has a position.” Whether
suggesting the split between the power of man and the vulnerability of
nature or depicting the man-made walls that cannot stop the urgent flow
of immigrants across borders, Harvey’s art sometimes takes positions
that may make us uncomfortable, even in its beauty. The important
thing, he says, is to make the viewer look—and think.